Moruya Markets - July 11th and 18th - Saturday

Alf and Jane make and sell homemade icecream for a living, mostly through local weekend markets. After lazing around for a few days, I offered to help Alf do the Saturday markets in Moruya. What I hadn't realised was that this meant getting up at 4.30 in the morning, getting ready and heading off in the dark and freezing cold. Having never been an early riser this actually wasn't as bad as I had imagined. And the sunrise as we reached the market site was quite spectacular. I realised I hadn't seen a sunset since the early 90s when I had got up and gone in early to see a dawn service in Brisbane. The sombre mood was completely ruined by roving gangs of arsehole TV crews with their halogen lights waving like lightsabers destroying the aforementioned sombre mood they were there to report on.

The first Saturday was pretty good, partly because of the novelty but partly because once you've set up the canopy, the tables and the WAECO, the rest of the day involves sitting around, serving customers and doing the cryptic crosswords in the Herald and The Australian. The second Saturday, however was much, much colder and a fog covered the market site keeping the temperature quite low and covering the ground in a thick dew. In helping t

o set up, I got the toes of my blundstones wet which soaked through to my socks and toes. Given that the air temperature was just over one degrees, I hate to think what it was on the ground. As a result, my toes became so cold I literally could not feel them. I tried walking around but that just seemed to hurt. In desperation I bought three pairs of woolen sock from the sock stall, whipped off my supposedly merino wool socks and put two dry pairs over my frozen toesies. Now dry, my feet were still no better off temperature-wise. When the fog eventually cleared and the sun came through, I pulled off my boots and newly acquired socks and stuck them in the sunlight, massaging what life I could back into them. It was about 3 hours after our arrival that I finally regained feeling in the last little toe. I had been imagining frostbite and black toenails dropping off but I think the unfamiliar pain had made me hysterical.

The now-non-cold toes cheered me up immensely and the rest of the market was again spent sitting around and doing the cryptics. Well, attempting to do the cryptics. While Alf and I are pretty good at the weekly ones, the Saturday puzzles are a lot more obscure and frustrating. We packed up about 1.30 and headed back to Cobargo. I crashed out and slept right through to dinnertime - beetroot and strawberry risotto cooked by Yvette.